Deeper “Inside Llewyn Davis”

It’s apt that the Coen brothers have taken on the world of folk music in “Inside Llewyn Davis,” because there’s something folk-like about their entire body of work. Their principle genre is the tall tale, the story that has come down orally and that grows into its heroic or mock-heroic dimensions through repeated telling, that has its odd details polished into gems of wonder and its inner significance sharpened into high relief as if through the accreted wisdom of the ages. At their best, the Coen brothers’ movies affect the tone of legend and allegory; legend itself plays a significant role in their work (as in the opening sequence of “A Serious Man”) and, for all their derisive and ribald glory, their films sometimes attain, by way of scripture by way of Kafka, an oracular philosophical authority.

“Inside Llewyn Davis” is centered on the Greenwich Village folk-music scene in 1961, which has long been among the legendary moments in modern culture—which is to say that pretty much everyone agrees that something great and crucial happened there and then, those who lived through it keep revisiting it, and those who didn’t can’t get enough of the telling. To recap: Llewyn Davis (played by Oscar Isaac), a proud but struggling young New York-based folk singer, lurches from mishap to mishap as he tries to relaunch his career as a solo act after the suicide of his musical partner, Mike Timlin. With their clear, clipped visual prose, Joel and Ethan Coen tell a good and juicy story, encapsulate on an intimate scale the sense of a grand historical transition, and elicit the story’s grander significance with an iridescent briskness that both gets to the core of the historical import and delivers its wisdom in modern terms to apply to modern life—and even to themselves.

I wrote here a few weeks ago about some of the movie’s personal dimensions; to talk about its wider implications means to talk about it in detail, to talk about the end as well as the beginning, the twists and turns as well as the overall contours—which is to say, there’s no way to do so without recourse to spoilers. Those who want to keep the surprises for the viewing, be forewarned.

Discussion of the film seems to gravitate around three themes, and the strange part is that one of them is a pure plot point. Several of Davis’s problems revolve around the middle-aged academic couple Mitch and Lillian Gorfein (Ethan Phillips and Robin Bartlett), friends who put him up in their comfortable Upper West Side apartment when he has no place else to crash. Davis has two scenes with the Gorfeins; the first turns emotionally violent when he’s grudgingly singing at their home, as if for his supper, and Lillian joins in singing harmony (“Mike’s part”); Davis curses her out and she storms from the room. The next time he visits, apologetically, Mitch is conciliatory, saying (I quote from memory), “We all get emotional over Mike.”

Some writers—starting, as far as I can tell, with Brad Brevet, who reported on the film when it screened at Cannes, last May—assume that the Gorfeins are Mike’s parents. There’s no concrete evidence that this is so—no specific reference to Mike as their son, no sense that the family is in mourning (their grief isn’t intense, they seem pretty chipper, their social and professional lives seem active and unencumbered)—but the notion adds a mythopoetic element that’s in keeping with the movie’s air of high legend. Nonetheless, there is the lingering question of why the Gorfeins seem so favorably disposed to Davis as they were to Mike.

In effect, the Gorfeins—together with another character, a doctor whom Davis visits to arrange an abortion (which, of course, was illegal at the time) for a woman he slept with—give the Coens’ movie its “Stardust Memories” slant. The Gorfeins are folk fans—Mitch owns a coveted vintage guitar, which he lets Davis play; Lillian knows the Timlin and Davis repertory by heart—and the doctor tells Davis, “I haven’t seen you at the hoots for a while.” These middle-aged, middle-class liberals are Davis’s core audience, and, regardless of his gratitude for their help, he doesn’t think that they share his fierce and exacting passion for the music.

Davis depends on them directly, and indirectly on many others like them, for whatever career he may have, but he is fundamentally unsympathetic to them and senses that, were push come to shove, they wouldn’t be sympathetic to him or to the deepest and most intimate extremes of his art. For them, folk music is a pleasure, perhaps a social and political marker, not their life’s urgent need. Yet here the Coens subtly plant one of their grand ironies, one that links up with the movie’s central current of metaphorical power: the Gorfeins and the principled abortionist prove to be among the most enduring audience that Davis might ever find, because his younger, hipper audience (as the movie’s whiplash ending shows) will be among the first to desert him.

With his panic deepening, Davis hitches a ride to Chicago in the hope of auditioning for Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), the owner of the Gate of Horn night club, who could give him a gig that would jump-start his career. That strange interlude has been the subject of controversy—as in a discussion on Twitter with the critics Dana Stevens and Jessica Gross—because it involves the film’s most extreme caricatures, in the personae of the two strangers whose ride he shares: a blowhard jazz musician (played by John Goodman) and his taciturn young driver (Garrett Hedlund—a comic bit of casting, since the actor played the Beat luminary Neal Cassady in “On the Road”).

The symbolic aspect of this sidebar is clear. The jazzman is a hardened cynic with a wound, a habit—and a career; the young actor is a self-deluding purist trapped in humiliating servitude; and for Davis, both options appear unbearable. He wants neither to be a hardened careerist nor a sacrificial idealist—and when he gets outside of New York, outside of the swirling intimacies of his daily life, those two options appear all the more starkly to him as the only choices at hand. Both options are unbearable; his life has become all the more hallucinatory and unreal to him; thus trapped, he needs a miracle to break him out of his bind; and that’s the miracle he hopes Grossman will be able to provide, the deus ex machina that will pull him out of his rut.

It doesn’t happen; Grossman doesn’t help, and Davis is, in effect, condemned to return to his life, to New York, to face the same travails all over again. Yet a miracle does occur—not for Davis, so to speak, but to him, exactly as it happened to the world at large at the same moment.

The movie has something of a circular form: it opens with Davis performing in a Village club and heading out to its back alley to meet a stranger, who insults him, beats him up, and leaves him on the ground. Davis is next seen sleeping on a sofa (at the Gorfeins’, it turns out), and the suggestion is that the two events happened in succession—first, the beating in the alley, then a recuperation. Davis, having been knocked down, picks himself up, dusts himself off, and starts all over again. Yet, at the end of the film, that scene turns up again and it becomes clear that the entire movie has been a quasi-flashback—not necessarily the events as Davis himself recalls them (though he is—if my memory serves—in every scene in the movie, suggesting that the story sticks very close to his own point of view) but the events that, in the recent week, led to Davis’s beating in the alley.

Yet at the end of the film, when Davis has finished performing at the club and heads to the back alley, another performer has already taken the stage—Bob Dylan, singing his song “Farewell.” Now that Dylan has come on the scene, Davis has been definitively pushed out of it. We understand that he’s knocked down, but this time he can’t get up—artistically and morally more than physically—because Dylan has administered the decisive knockout blow. Llewyn will never be the same; the gig is now up. The Coen brothers here deliver their own knockout blow of philosophical irony, that there’s something worse than the eternal recurrence—namely, when some catastrophic force breaks you out of the circle you’ve learned to cope with and sends you into free fall.

That’s the miracle: Bob Dylan’s arrival, and, with him, the rise of the singer-songwriter, the repudiation of pure folk. Llewyn Davis interprets traditional songs and invests them with the full force of his emotional turmoil, his grand depth of feeling. And it’s not enough: Dylan turns up and radically refashions the elements of folk music by way of his own poetic gift, an art of radical neoclassicism that takes a tradition and remakes it even to the breaking point, to the point of his own break with it. He was a one-man New Wave.

P.S. “Inside Llewyn Davis” is a wintry movie, taking place in early 1961. Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” opened in New York on February 7, 1961 (at which time it was reviewed in The New Yorker by … Roger Angell, whose passionately enthusiastic review is one of the most keenly discerning that the movie has ever received). In 1988, in the magazine Actuel, Godard spoke at length about Dylan, explaining that he considered himself to be in “correspondence” with Dylan, and that he saw his own artistic career in parallel with Dylan’s.